Check out Kudos at IBM ConnectED 2015 and WIN a SONOS!

Ok. I admit it. My name is Adam Brown and I am a Sonos Addict (just ask vowe). And now you can be as well:) Win a Sonos PLAY:1 wireless hifi at ConnectEd! These things are just awesome. I have just added two PLAY:1 to my growing Sonos collection at home. They certainly pack some punch and hooked up to Spotify/Pandora/Deeza/Radio/more.... will give you "ALL THE MUSIC ON EARTH".

The Australian team (and Tony from UK;) at ISW and Kudos are giving away a Sonos PLAY:1 at IBM ConnectED to one lucky conference delegate. Kudos/ISW is making the annual pilgrimage to Orlando for the IBM ConnectED so we hope to see you there. We have some very exciting new features for Kudos that we are sure our IBM Connections clients are going to love.

The pitch from Sonos:

"The Sonos system offers deep, crystal clear HiFi sound in a compact and surprisingly powerful unit and can stream all your music library, popular music providers and internet radio; all controlled from your smartphone. You can even add your prize to more Sonos units to build a system for your entire home or workplace!"

The pitch from us:

Be very careful;) While one Sonos is very awesome. Two is even better. Three.... one for the office....need one downstairs as well...maybe one we can use outside.....kitchen.....so consider yourself warned. You will not stop at just one of these puppies!

How do you get your hands on one of these beauties?

All you need to do to win is visit the Kudos team at Pedestal B29, scan your badge and collect one of our adorable Koala's souvenirs and maybe some Aussie chocolates (TIM TAM anyone). That is it. We will make a draw on the last day of the conference and notify the winner.

Kudos is an award-winning suite of applications designed to reward user adoption, measure performance and increase productivity for IBM Connection users. When entering the prize draw why not learn more about what Kudos can do for your organisation, face to face with the team, or check out our Youtube Kudos playlist.

And the nice thing about visiting us at Pedestal B29 is that you can then rock past Crossware at B30 and enter their very cool draw for an Apple Watch. @RobHollier I assume we can enter as well?

Inform Australia (a.k.a. AusLUG) call for Speaker Abtracts

The awesome team organising Inform Australia 2014 (previously AusLUG) have announced the new dates for the event, being Sept 4th & 5th Sept in Melbourne. This will be the 4th annual event and it is great to have it back in Melbourne for the 2nd time.

Inform recently announced that the event is open now for speakers to submit abstracts. Having been fortunate enough to speak at the previous events I can only encourage everyone to have a go and share your knowledge. Developers, Administrators, Users, Managers, Business people, IBMers....all sessions ideas are welcome and the audience tend to be great and interactive. Connections, Domino, Sametime, Traveller, Smartcloud, Talent Suite and Kenexa, Digital Experience, Forms, Portal, Worklight, User Adoption, Success Stories, technical or business, or even just a general topic related to collaboration.

So go on, give it a go. I guarantee you won't regret it. To submit an abstract just head over to the Inform site, register, and then just submit a session from your Profile page.

Kudos Boards for IBM Connections is ready to roll! Social Connections here we come!

Following on from the announcement of the pending release of Kudos Boards at IBM Connect 2014 we are now ready to roll!! I am very please to announce the full release of Kudos Boards. Post Connect we have been feverishly working away to finalise Kudos Boards for IBM Connections and have completed all of the capabilities we wanted to deliver in the initial release. We have had Boards in a pre-release pilot for the last couple of months, and have had heaps of feedback from our awesome customers and partners around the world. We have lots of additional capabilities we will be adding over the next few months however we feel it is now ready for showtime!

The Kudos mission is to increase the user adoption, measure performancea and ROI, and increase user productivity for IBM Connections. Our 4th Design Goal for Kudos is to Increase User Productivity Through Clever Design. And this is exactly where Kudos Boards is focused.

Kudos Boards creates a visual interface, based on the Kanban methodology, for IBM Connections Activities. Thru the use of a visual interface users are able to leverage the Activities capability in a more intuitive and personalized way. Drag and Drop, Click to Change, Quick and Easy. Sometimes Activities can become a little overwhelming for users....Soooo Many Activities......Soooo many tasks and entries.....where do I focus? Kudos Boards fixes this problem via the My Boards interface by enabling users to focus on what is important to them, sort and manage their Activities in a personalized way, colour code, categorise, pin boards, and access their important Activites/Boards quickly and easily. Once in a Board they can intereact and use the Activity in a more intuitive way. All the time keeping the Board automagically in sync with the Activity...in real time! Magically refreshing in front of your eyes. Very neat stuff! This will increase the usage of Activities, which will result in happier users, more engaged users, leading ulitmately to increase in adoption of Connections overall.

Off course a picture (or a video:) is worth a thousand words so I have recorded the below video showing the latest release of Boards.

I am just about to pack my bags for a trip to Social Connections so for everyone that is going to be there will be able to see Kudos Boards first hand. If you can't get there however please reach out to us via www.kudosbadges.com and we will be happy to provide a trial version or schedule a web demo just for you.

ISW helps CEMEX integrate IBM Connections and Forms Experience Builder with SAP

ISW has recently been working with one of our great Kudos clients, CEMEX, on a few projects extending IBM Connections. One in particular is a great example of how the IBM Connections Activity Stream can be extended to include events from 3rd party applications. In this case CEMEX are using SAP. SAP generates a lot of events that require action from users. For example an Expense Request Approval or a Purchase Order Approval. By integrating these events with IBM Connections we are able to deliver these events via the Activity Stream and then using an Embedded Experience with Open Social Gadgets, the user can view the work item, take action such as approving or rejecting the item, all without leaving IBM Connections. Being able to stay within the context of Connections results in an improved user experience, as well as a quicker approval process.

The second part of this project was to also integrate Forms Experience Builder with SAP. CEMEX wanted to deliver an improved user experience by developing more intuitive forms within their WebSphere Portal intranet - CEMEX Shift. Using the same techniques as with Connections ISW was able to integrate well designed electronic forms so that when they are submitted by the user the information is sent to SAP to continue the business process.

The following case study has all the details:

ISW helps Cemex integrate IBM Connections and Forms Experience Builder with SAP

If you are interested in learning more come visit us at our Kudos/ISW booth at IBM Connect - Ped 113.

Kudos Boards for IBM Connections Video

Ok so after announcing Kudos Boards for IBM Connections about 2 weeks ago we have been flooded with questions asking for more..... So here is a video I recorded that demonstrates Kudos Boards in detail. We will be at IBM Connect next week in Orlando (Ped 113) so come see for yourself and give it a go. We would love to hear your ideas, to add to our own long list, on how you think we can make Kudos Boards even better. But for now we are very excited to show of the great work that the Kudos team has done to date. For more info...

The video has about 2 mins at the beginning explaining why we have built Kudos Boards. To skip straight to the magic just jump ahead to about 1m55s.